Evolution is the fundamental organizing principle of biology and phylogeny is the fundamental framework for understanding evolutionary history. Reconstructing the Tree of Life has been a goal of biologists since Darwin first included his conception of a phylogenetic tree as the sole figure in On the Origin of Species. However, the recognized importance of accurately reconstructing evolutionary history now extends far beyond the confines of evolutionary biology. Historical evolutionary inference has become an integral component of research in molecular biology, genomics, medicine, conservation, agriculture, epidemiology, and even forensics.

Our lab evaluates, creates, and applies phylogenetic methods to some of today's most pressing questions.

Jeremy is currently on sabbatical and will be spending the months of April, May, and June visiting the Division of Ecology and Evolution in the Research School of Biology at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra.

A big congratulations to Maruska Lab and Phyleaux Lab Ph.D. student Teisha King, who recently won the 2018 SICB Best Student Presentation competition for the Division of Neurobiology, Neuroethology, and Sensory Biology (DNNSB)! Teisha presented a poster titled, "Behavior and neural activation patterns of non-redundant visual and acoustic signaling during courtship in an African cichlid fish." Well done, Teisha!

Here's an overview of our lab's high-performance computer usage since April 1st of this year. I've plotted the usage from single days in units of CPU years. In total, if we tried to run all of these analyses on just one CPU, it would have taken 78 years! In fact, we used more than 1 CPU year on 26 separate days, with a high of 8.2 on June 10th. Perhaps not surprisingly, this fell just a few weeks before the Evolution meetings in Portland.

In collaboration with the lab of Emily Lemmon at Florida State University, Dr. Brown and former LSU doctoral student Eric N. Rittmeyer spent several years sampling chorus frogs (Pseudacris fouquettei and P. nigrita) from a hybrid zone that occurs along the Pearl River, separating Louisiana and Mississippi. By comparing modern samples to tissue samples collected 40 years earlier and stored in the LSU Museum of Natural Science, they were able to show that the hybrid zone has stayed in roughly the same position but widened over the decades:

Slides from several talks by Brown lab members at the 2016 Evolution meetings are now available online. Look here for links. Some talks should also have been recorded and will be uploaded to the Evolution 2016 YouTube channel in the future.

Dr. Guifang Zhou, a mathematician most recently at Florida State University, will be joining the Brown Phyleaux Lab in August 2015 as a postdoctoral researcher. Dr. Zhou, along with her Ph.D. advisor Dr. Kyle Gallivan and other graduate students at FSU, has been collaborating with the Brown Lab for several years on a project to leverage network-based mathematical methods for understanding the information in large sets of phylogenetic trees.

Dr. Lyndon Coghill recently agreed to join the Brown Phyleaux Lab in August 2015 as a postdoctoral researcher. Dr. Coghill will be working on an NSF-funded project (DEB-1355071) to develop tools for assessing the fit between models and data in phylogenetics.